


Virtue Needs Some Cheaper Thrills

by roachpatrol



Category: Calvin & Hobbes
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-03
Updated: 2014-01-03
Packaged: 2018-01-07 06:12:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1116450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roachpatrol/pseuds/roachpatrol
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The thing is: Hobbes would go, if they told him to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Virtue Needs Some Cheaper Thrills

“Are we in love?” Calvin asks one crisp autumn night. They’re fifteen, and he’s hanging off the windowsill of her second floor bedroom.

 

“No,” Susie says firmly. She’s doing trigonometry like a good girl. She has to be the good girl because Calvin insists on being such a bad boy, and she resents it just as much as ever. Maybe even more than that.  

 

Calvin just props his chin on his palm and keeps staring at her.

 

“Love wouldn’t suck this much,” Susie clarifies.

 

“Tell that to Juliet,” Calvin says. He kicks his feet, thump, thump, into the side of the house. If he keeps doing that her parents are going to hear, so she finally looks back at him.

 

“Calvin, if you were my Romeo I’d stab you,” she says.

 

Calvin snickers appreciatively. “If you were my Juliet I’d poison myself first!”

 

“Does this make Hobbes our Tybalt?”

 

“I’d play the Nurse,” Hobbes says, rolling over Susie’s bed and dragging all the sheets into an enormous tiger-sized burrito. “I always wanted to try out a wimple.”

 

Susie doesn’t say it, but Hobbes would be their poison. Or their knife. She looks at Calvin, and he looks back at her.

 

“Do your homework,” she says.

 

“Hobbes, do my homework,” he says.

 

“Hobbes, tell him to do his homework,” she says.

 

“A pox on both your houses,” Hobbes says, and yawns so every tooth catches the light.

 

*

 

When she is six, she remembers, she first meets Hobbes and he shakes her hand: his paw is so big her fingers can’t wrap all the way around it, and his pads feel like warm, dusty boot leather.

 

“You must be Ms Derkins,” he says, purring the r’s just a little. “I would be delighted to make the acquaintance of so fine a lady, should she permit this humble tiger the pleasure of her company,” and then he kisses the back of her small hand, so delicately all she feels is whisker.

 

“Mr Hobbes,” she says. “You’re a complete gentleman, is what you are!” and gives him her best curtsey. He returns to her a dashing bow, and then he has to go have a vicious fight with Calvin, who is throwing an infantile tantrum about cooties. The nasty child finally tows Hobbes away by the tail, but he goes along blowing kisses back at her while she waves goodbye.

 

After that, they are good friends and always on their most scrupulously courteous behavior, like a joke: that boring, mousy little Susie is a lady, and that Hobbes—with his nails like knives and his breath like dead things—isn’t a tiger.

 

*

 

They make a list, when they’re eleven, after the first time Calvin's dad tries to throw Hobbes out. More correctly, Susie and Hobbes make the list, and Calvin complains, and flicks pencil shavings into Susie’s hair.

 

The list is titled PROJECT NORMAL.

 

The list says:

 

GET GOOD GRADES

DO YOUR CHORES

MAKE OTHER FRIENDS

NO MORE FIGHTING

 

The problem, of course, is that Calvin is Calvin, and Hobbes continues to be Hobbes. Susie drops her head to her desk. She is eleven and already she feels hopelessly old.  

 

Calvin pats her on the back, and then puts pencil shavings down her shirt.

 

*

 

The thing is: Hobbes would go, if they told him to. He’s a tiger, as he often reminds them, as if any amount of table manners might make them forget, and even in the American midwest there’s deer. There’s rabbits. Susie’s seen the bones in the woods, the ribs scattered in the creek out back of Calvin’s back yard like old bird cages. Hobbes could get by without them.

 

If they wanted him to go.

 

*

 

The thing is: they don’t.

 


End file.
